Here mournfully went by a
child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable
from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a
man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful
and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a
woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were
lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments,
monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary
and unhappy existence.

"--Yours, sir?"

The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had
been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and
perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question.

"Oh! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those
two portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?"

"On Porter's wages, sir. But I am Lamps."

The traveller looked a little confused.

"Who did you say you are?"

"Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as farther
explanation.

"Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?"

"Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but--"
Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that
plainly added--"but it's a blessed circumstance for you that it's
not open."

"You couldn't recommend it, I see, if it was available?"

"Ask your pardon, sir. If it was -?"

"Open?"

"It ain't my place, as a paid servant of the company, to give my
opinion on any of the company's toepics,"--he pronounced it more
like toothpicks,--"beyond lamp-ile and cottons," returned Lamps in a
confidential tone; "but, speaking as a man, I wouldn't recommend my
father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he'd be
treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would
NOT."

The traveller nodded conviction. "I suppose I can put up in the
town? There is a town here?" For the traveller (though a stay-at-
home compared with most travellers) had been, like many others,
carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction
before, without having ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.

"Oh yes, there's a town, sir! Anyways, there's town enough to put
up in. But," following the glance of the other at his luggage,
"this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest
time. I might a'most call it our deadest and buriedest time."

"No porters about?"

"Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in
general goes off with the gas. That's how it is. And they seem to
have overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the
platform. But, in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up."

"Who may be up?"

"The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin' till the Up X
passes, and then she"--here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded
Lamps--"does all as lays in her power."

"I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement."

"I doubt if anybody do, sir. She's a Parliamentary, sir. And, you
see, a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun--"

"Do you mean an Excursion?"

"That's it, sir.--A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly DOES
go off into a sidin'. But, when she CAN get a chance, she's
whistled out of it, and she's whistled up into doin' all as,"--Lamps
again wore the air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best,-
-"all as lays in her power."

He then explained that the porters on duty, being required to be in
attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless
turn up with the gas. In the meantime, if the gentleman would not
very much object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the
warmth of his little room - The gentleman, being by this time very
cold, instantly closed with the proposal.

A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive, to the sense of smell, of
a cabin in a Whaler. But there was a bright fire burning in its
rusty grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly
trimmed and lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a
bright show, and their light, and the warmth, accounted for the
popularity of the room, as borne witness to by many impressions of
velveteen trousers on a form by the fire, and many rounded smears
and smudges of stooping velveteen shoulders on the adjacent wall.
Various untidy shelves accommodated a quantity of lamps and oil-
cans, and also a fragrant collection of what looked like the pocket-
handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family.